Fifth Largest Hospital Chain Pares Religious Ties

Faced with the need to expand beyond the West Coast and to either affiliate or merge with other organizations, Catholic Healthcare West is ceasing its governing board’s relationship with the Catholic church and changing its name to Dignity Health.

The fifth largest hospital system in the nation, the 40-hospital system is revenue wise and seeks to triple in size to gain a national purchase. However, sources say, restrictions mandated by its ties to the church have hobbled its efforts, especially at its 15 secular facilities. Mergers have collapsed, and some affiliations have only succeeded thanks to unusual agreements.

Dignity says the system’s Catholic hospitals will continue to follow church directives and have relationships with the religious orders that governed the system. Those orders will retain final authority if Dignity wants to sell the hospital. Kaiser Health News says this change is more dramatic than those affected at other Catholic hospital systems.

4 Responses to “Fifth Largest Hospital Chain Pares Religious Ties”

It funny that they changed their name to “Dignity”, after all of the problems their religious affiliation caused…I can picture the board members saying, “Enough! Let’s take what little dignity we have left, and make it the name of our health system!”

In this day and age I can’t believe someone is casting stones at a religious faith, no one lives in glass houses, even if they think otherwise. Scandals in religion happen in every religious affiliation, no one religion is better than anyone else’s. Whatever happen to compassion, no one has the right to persecute anyone’s faith or beliefs, haven’t we learned anything? Ignorance amazes me, yes even in the year 2012. Dignity-the quality or state of being worthy of esteem or respect.
Respect other’s as you would want them to respect you . . . I’m just sayin

I believe misinterpreted what I meant by that – I should clarify: When I said “all of the problems their religious affiliation caused,” I was referring to this:

“However, sources say, restrictions mandated by its ties to the church have hobbled its efforts, especially at its 15 secular facilities. Mergers have collapsed, and some affiliations have only succeeded thanks to unusual agreements.” Dignity is severing their ties with the Catholic church, because the church’s strict rules, have proven bad for business, for that particular health system. I can certainly see how my comment could be taken out of context, though.

I apologize for the misunderstanding; I certainly didn’t intent for my comment to be perceived as an attack on anyone’s faith, or an allusion to any of the scandals, that religious organizations have endured.